Stress, Rupture and Repair: Cellular Responses to Lysosomal Damage

Speaker: Phyllis I. Hanson

Venue: Room 205, Floor 1, Complex Building, School of Medicine, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: Phyllis Hanson is the Minor J. Coon Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she has served as department chair since 2018. She earned a BA in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale and PhD degrees from Stanford, where she studied how autophosphorylation and Ca2+ regulate CaMKII. During postdoctoral work at Yale, she helped establish the parallel architecture of the SNARE complex and the role of NSF-driven disassembly in membrane fusion. Her subsequent studies of AAA+ ATPases led her to the ESCRT machinery and to some of the first direct visualizations of ESCRT-III polymers remodeling membranes. Her laboratory discovered that ESCRTs repair lysosomal membranes and now investigates how cells determine whether damaged lysosomes and other cellular membranes remain resilient, undergo repair, or rupture.